down to earth. His duties are as important as they are varied. Life has its responsibilities and its labors. Dis regard or neglect them, and you oppose the great design of the Maker of the universe. Fulfil them, and the reward will be sweet and rich, in the calm delights of a satisfied conscience, in the feeling that life has not been as an idle dream, in the undefinable pleasure excited by the tokens of gratitude, deep from the hearts of those you have succored and saved.

Let us know, then, our duties, to perform them. Let us seek to appreciate, not only what directly interests us as individuals, but whatever concerns us in our relations to our fellow-men, our connection as social beings, our sympathies as brethren of one great family. We are by nature social beings, born and capacitated for society. We are no more fitted for solitude than the eagle for the dungeon. Seclusion from society enervates the mind, impairs the faculties, and blunts the moral nature; while communion with our fellow-men warms the soul with a fervent glow, inspires the mind for its noblest and most glorious labors, and infuses an energy and a life to all, which forces the individual onward and upward.

Our social being is necessary to our individual happiness and advancement. They are indissolubly welded together, and no circumstances or habits can completely separate them. For a man to say that he cares not for others that he will act without reference to the happiness and interests of those around him-shows that he is not only an unhappy but an ignorant man. We can no more divest ourselves of our responsibilities to our fellow-men, than we can put an end to our moral accountability. This responsibility commences with our existence, and terminates with our lives.

The moment we come in contact with our fellowbeings, that moment we are bound to enter into a mutual contract to respect certain inalienable individual rights, though they conflict with or abridge our own immediate pleasure or profit-to allow claims which may restrict our liberties, and perform duties from which we receive no direct benefit. We enter into an involuntary association, from which we cannot recede, and to whose regu

lations we must be subservient. In plainer words, we enter into society. We become component parts of the great social system. As I have said, we are formed for this by nature. We enter into it without our consent. and assume its moral responsibilities, from which we cannot escape. But nature, by placing us in this connection, and imposing these duties and responsibilities, is not unmindful of our happiness. For, to incite us to perform our duties to others, we have implanted within us deep and irresistible emotions, welling forth from our inmost hearts, emotions active and ever-living; they are emotions of sympathy and love. They are natural and innate. If rightly cherished, they inspire us with an affection toward all around us. First nurtured in the family circle, kindled at the family altar, they increase, until they embrace in their glowing conceptions the whole human race. They form a bright and golden chain, which entwines itself around and leads a willing captive the human heart.

EXERCISE XXXIV.

THE DEATH OF J. Q. ADAMS.

MR. ADAMS must be pronounced happy in the circumstances of his death, as his course through life had been inarked and glorious. No excesses of a profligate youth, no vices of middle life, had shattered and hurried to a premature dissolution the body in which such an incorruptible spirit resided. Nothing in his habits of life interfered with nature, to whose gentle influences it was left to destroy gradually, and to restore, in a good old age, to its parent dust, the perishable part of our friend. The law of mortality, which knows no exception among the passing generations of our race, was executed in his case with as much tenderness and reserve, so to speak, as is ever permitted by Providence. The Angel of Death came to him a year before his departure, with a sum

This, and the following Exercise, were taken from the eloquent discourse of the Rev. Wm. P. Lunt, at the funeral of J. Q. Adams.

mons, which seemed to anxious friends to be peremptory and final. But we can imagine an expression of reluctance in the angel's face, as she turned away and kindly said, "Not yet.' And there is reason to believe, that the year which was thus spared to the venerable patriot has been a happy one. It was, in fact, the Indian summer of his life.

He was not left to be an object of com; assion to friends and admirers. No painful contrasts forced them to revert in memory to better days. But with a mind unimpaired; with an interest in life unabated; with a cheerful relish of the same simple pleasures that he had ever enjoyed; with a self-command which protracted sickness had not destroyed; with a heart still warm and open to he impressions of nature and the universe; with an eye that still ranged with delight through the starry spaces, or watched the intricate and intervolved orbits of men's passions and opinions on the nearer theatre of political, social, and religious life upon the earth; on the chosen field of his labors; in the place where his best services to is country had been rendered, and his noblest triumphs had been won; ministered to by the representatives of the nation, from North, South, East and West, he passed to his rest. The Angel of Death, when she came again to execute her office, left him only the consciousness tha it was the "last of earth;" then drew a veil of oblivio over his faculties, and sat beside his couch two days before the cord that bound him to this world was sev ered.

EXERCISE XXXV.

J. Q. ADAMS.

I SHALL not presume, on this occasion, to judge of the character of Mr. Adams, or to settle his claims as a scholar, a statesman, or a philosopher. I leave that task to others more competent for the office. The same principle which governs in criminal trials should also be adopted in judging of merit, absolute or relative, in any of the great departments of theoretical or practica' life.

Let a man be tried by his peers. can be found, I leave the departed.

To his peers, if they

But I think no one will dissent from the statement that the life which has recently been closed was an em-inently useful life. Mr. Adams has not lived for himself. His great powers; his affluent resources; his abundant learning; his memory, which held with a tenacious grasp whatever had once passed into the treasury of his mind; his commanding influence, beyond, probably, what any individual among his contemporary countrymen has ever exercised over public opinion; his dreaded controversial skill, which, like the mill-stone in Scripture, was fatal alike to those on whom it fell, and to those who fell. upon it; the numerous offices which he has filled, from the time when, as a lad, he went to St. Petersburg as private secretary to the minister to that court, through more than fifty years of public service abroad and at home, down to the very moment of his death; all these gifts, native and acquired, have been used by him to promote the welfare of his country and of mankind.

He has been, what the Scripture declares the good magistrate to be, "a minister of God for good" to his native land. In peace and in war; in foreign courts, contending against the insolence of power, and threading the labyrinth of political intrigue; in forming treaties upon which the fortunes and lives of thousands depended; in adjusting territorial boundaries, and negotiating for an extension of our national domain; in guiding the ship of state, often amidst shoals and rocks, and with a crew half disposed to mutiny; in maturing and carrying into execution, so far as he was allowed to do it, a wise prospective national policy; in efforts to promote the cause of education, of science, of freedom, of morals, of religion; he has lived for others; he has laid upon the altar of his country and his God his exalted talents. And this trait in his character is to be in a great measure traced to the counsels of that admirable mother, that more than Roman, that Christian matron, who stamped upon his impressible mind the image of her own virtues, and who charged him, from a child, to consecrate his faculties to his country and to his Creator.

EXERCISE XXXVI.

MOTIVES FOR ACTION.

THE most powerful motives call on us, as scl olars, for those efforts which our common country demands of all her children. Most of us are of that class who owe whatever of knowledge has shone into our minds to the free and popular institutions of our native land. There are few of us who may not be permitted to boast that we have been reared in an honest poverty or a frugal competence, and owe everything to those means of education which are equally open to all. We are summoned to new energy and zeal by the high nature of the experiment we are appointed in Providence to make, and the grandeur of the theatre on which it is to be performed.

When the old world afforded no longer any hope, it pleased Heaven to open this last refuge of humanity. The attempt has begun, and is going on, far from foreign corruption, on the broadest scale, and under the most benignant prospects; and it certainly rests with us to solve the great problem in human society, to settle, and that forever, the momentous question whether mankind can be trusted with a purely popular system? One might almost think, without extravagance, that the departed wise and good of all places and times are looking down from their happy seats to witness what shall now be done by us; that they who have lavished their treasures and their blood of old, who labored and suffered, who spake and wrote, who fought and perished, in the one great cause of Freedom and Truth, are now hanging from their orbs on high, over the last solemn experiment of humanity.

As I have wandered over the spots, once the scene of their labors, and mused among the prostrate columns of their senate-houses and forums, I have seemed almost to hear a voice from the tombs of departed ages; from the sepulchres of the nations which died before the sight They exhort us, they adjure us to be faithful to our They implore us, by the long trials of struggling humanity; by the blessed memory of the departed: by

trust.